The book covers a wide range of cinematic femininities: It starts with Marilyn Monroe’s cool phrase "We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle", which self-confidently marked her profession - with a wink, because she did not say "to sparkle". The (self-) staging of women also ironically plays its being tailored to the male gaze. In this section we discuss movies like Some like it hot, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Cet obscur objet du désir and Le Mépris  - with a notable chapter by Laura Mulvey. Moreover, some fifty films later, the book ends with a section on Self-Empowerment and Identity, featuring films like Thelma & Louise, The Hours, Blue Valentine and Carol.

Are women in film really just those who are seen and displayed? Where are the ones who see and who point to something themselves? Where are the women in the audience, behind the camera? If, as feminist psychoanalytical film criticism rightly observes, the stars and starlets, especially in Hollywood mainstream cinema, are supposed to serve the male gaze as eye candy and self-assurance, what is the role of the women who do not fit into this scheme, the anti-heroes, the women who feel and act, those through whose eyes the world experiences a completely different way of being seen? Not only in arthouse cinema, but also in the mainstream, there is far more to the thousand facets of staged femininity than the simple formula of the male gaze. The book shows the most diverse stagings of femininity in great (and terrible) films, and explores (according to the approach of film psychoanalysis) how these staging affect the unconscious, or also the not-yet-conscious of viewers.

Each of the eight sections deals with a thematic aspect of the staging of suffering or sovereign femininity in feature films. They follow a chronological structure to illustrate how the genre has evolved. Each section is held together by an editorial introduction.